1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an electronic musical instrument which synthesizes musical tones on the basis of musical tone information representing waveform data, rhythm data, performance data and the like of non-electronic musical instruments such as the piano, violin and the like.
2. Prior Art
Recently, in the field of the electronic musical instruments, several kinds of recording and reproducing apparatuses are developed and are brought into practice. At first, sounds produced from the musical instruments such as the piano are subjected to sampling operation, thus obtaining sampling data which are eventually stored in memories. Then, the sampling data are read out from the memories and are used to reproduce the sounds of the musical instruments. The above-mentioned recording and reproducing apparatus is called a "sampler". In a waveform recording mode, a microphone converts the sounds of the musical instruments into electric signals, which are sequentially supplied to an analog-to-digital converter (i.e., A/D converter). The A/D converter converts those electric signals into waveform data by every sampling period. Then, the waveform data are stored in a random-access memory (i.e., RAM) and the like.
When recording the sounds of the piano and the like, a so-called "multi-sampling technique" is used. According to the multi-sampling technique the whole frequency range to which all of the sounds produced from the piano belongs is divided into several sectors (each denoted to as a tone area); and then, the waveform is sampled with respect to each of the tone areas. Herein, one tone area corresponds to three keys of the piano, for example. This multi-sampling technique is effective to reproduce the tone color unique to the piano with accuracy. On the other hand, when reproducing the sounds whose waveforms are sampled as described above, the waveform data belonging to the tone area corresponding to a key-depression event is read out from the memory; and then, the sound corresponding to the read waveform data is produced by use of the tone pitch designated by the keycode corresponding to the key-depression event.
In the above-mentioned recording and reproducing apparatus, the waveform data which are obtained by performing the sampling operations are saved and stored in an external storage unit such as a hard disk unit. When saving the waveform data, the waveform data are transferred to and are registered in accordance with a file name (or a file number) which is designated by a user. As the file name to be assigned to the waveform data, it is demanded to use the name which represents the contents of the waveform data to be registered. However, when registering the waveform data which are obtained by the aforementioned multi-sampling technique, a plenty of file names assigned to a plenty of waveform data whose properties are similar to each other should be provided and are inputted into the storage unit, which requires complicated operations for the user.
Moreover, when assisting the file name to the waveform data, there is a possibility in that the file name previously used is assigned to the waveform data to be currently registered by mistake. In such case, new waveform data are overwritten on the file in which another waveform data have been already written, resulting that those waveform data are destroyed by the new waveform data. Further, the file name must be given with some meaning representing the contents of the waveform data in order to presume the contents of the waveform data from the file name. If the file name is not determined in connection with the contents of the waveform data, it is difficult for the user to search out the desired file.
As a result, the conventional recording and reproducing apparatus to be applied to the electronic musical instrument is troublesome because it requires the complicated operations for the users. For example, when registering the sampling waveform data, the user should input each of the file names manually, while each of the file names should be given with the meaning which is useful to discriminate the contents of the files.